9 September 2011

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did not spring fully-formed
from the head of a revolutionary God. They were products of an environment, and
that environment was Hegelian, and “Hegelianist”.

Let us recap. George
William Frederick Hegel, Philosopher, died of cholera in Berlin in
1831. In the same year Karl von Clausewitz, who had
applied Hegel’s thought to military science, died in the same
epidemic. Both these men had achieved high honours and high academic positions
in Prussia in their lifetimes. For the following ten years, under the
sponsorship of the Prussian Minister of Culture, “Hegelianism” became an
academic cult in Prussia, the dominant German and Central European power.

The Hegelianist period in Germany was not altogether a
“Triumphal Procession”. It was not uniform over time. It developed internal
contradictions. Hegelianism as a whole began to be problematic for the Prussian
monarchist, semi-feudal state. This was not surprising. Whatever Hegel himself
or his sponsors may have thought about the completion of history, in practice
Hegel had let the dialectical genie out of its bottle. New theories of
revolution were bound to arise, and did arise.

As a consequence, Hegelianism was actively discouraged from
1841. The opening event of this attempted suppression was the series of
official state-sponsored lectures given by F W J Schelling in 1841, in the presence
of a considerable number of subsequently-famous people, including Frederick
Engels. We will return to this event, known as the “Expurgation of
Hegelianism”, in the next part.

The internal divisions in Hegelianism included “Left” and “Right”
Hegelians, and the “Young Hegelians” (self-named “The Free”). The latter were people
personally known to Karl Marx. Marx had been studying in Berlin from 1836 and
began associating with the Young Hegelians in 1838 (when Marx was 20 years old).
Engels spent the year of 1841 in Berlin as a military cadet where he, too,
associated himself with the Young Hegelians (see Engels’ sketch of a gathering
of “The Free”, above). The two future revolutionaries did not meet in Berlin,
but only met in 1842, in Cologne, Germany, when Marx was editing the magazine Rheinische Zeitung, and Engels was on his
way to England. Both were by this time having problems with the Young
Hegelians.

Marx and Engels teamed up permanently in late 1844, in Paris,
France, and in the following twelve months or so they worked out what people
now call “Marxism” as a concrete set of revolutionary ideas for the first time.
They did so in a polemical process, and their polemical opponents were the
other former Young Hegelians, especially Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. The
background of the polemic was their common grounding in Hegel’s philosophy and
in that sense, Hegel could be said to be the third founder of Marxism. The
foreground of the polemic with the other Young Hegelians was a matter of
setting aside the non-revolutionary, essentially reactionary, anti-semitic
trend of Bauer, and the anarchist trend of Stirner.

Marx and Engels’ combined polemic against the Young
Hegelians was commenced almost as soon as they got together and it was
completed in the same year, 1844, to be published the following year, 1845.
This was their first joint work, their first jointly published work, and their
last work that was not yet fully “Marxist”. It is called “The Holy Family”. In
1845, Marx and Engels wrote another work of polemic against the Young
Hegelians, known as “The German Ideology”,
which includes the “Theses on Feuerbach”,
and this one is indeed fully Marxist. It was not published in full until after
their deaths, but the composition of “The German Ideology” undoubtedly marks
the beginning of mature “Marxism”.

The purpose of the above recapitulation is to show that the birth
of Marxism is saturated with the legacy of Hegel. It is reasonable to say that
Marx and Engels set out to defend Hegel’s legacy against Schelling, Bauer,
Stirner and all comers, while at the same time correcting, developing and
improving on Hegel’s work, and that this project turned into what we know as
Marxism. The argument begins among Hegelians and in contestation with other
Hegelians. This shows why it was that when Engels, late in life and after the
death of Marx, came to sum up their work in various ways, the recollection of
these origins brought Hegel’s theories to the forefront once again.

The enormous amount of work that Engels did after Marx’s 1883
death included the editing and publication of “Capital”, Volumes 2 and 3, the
writing of “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and The State” (based
partly on Marx’s papers), and the preparation of the 1886 pamphlet called in
full “Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”. Engels died in
1895.

Our main reading matter is the first and the fourth of the
four sections of Engels’ “Ludwig Feuerbach”, of which the hero, jointly with
Marx, is undoubtedly Hegel. Engels states in the first part (“Hegel”) that they
were in a “philosophical revolution”.
In the fourth part (“Marx”), Engels states: “Hegel
was not simply put aside. On the contrary, a start was made from his
revolutionary side, described above, from the dialectical method”.

The documents given here are short and readable and very
much in keeping with the Communist University practice of giving you original
writings to discuss. The next will be one by Hegel himself.